VPN it is to slow when i browse my LAN, why?

[Templar2k]

Hi everyone,

I'm a Systems Administrator for a company and I recently setup the VPN to allow other satellite offices access our Corporate LAN, Our VPN server uses 2 netcards (1) for the LAN and the (2) for the VPN request or remote access. Remote access works fine, but when i try to conect using the vpn it is so slow, i mean it is ridiculous, the time between browsing computers on my LAN it takes up to 1-2 mins. Now, all of our offices have DSL and it should be fast, i wonder what am i doing wrong? or what need to do to fine-tune our vpn connection and settings? Any VPN experts out there that might give a hand? or share tips?

Until then, best regards
I.R.

 

[qedadmin]

I have found that browsing a remote LAN through VPN can be probematic. How is your VPN set up besides the 2 NICs? Are you using Win2K?

How are the remote offices connecting? Do they have their own VPN servers (are you creating a tunnel between two VPN servers) or are remote clients coming directly into your VPN server?

Try connecting to your LAN from a remote VPN location/client and opening IE. Then pick a remote machine you want to attach to and type \\remoteservername in the Address bar. Do you find this faster than browsing to the share?

If does not cause security issues I would try installing NETBEUI on the remote VPN and Server interfaces. I have found this can help network browsing speed a lot.

 

[charipuki]

You may not be able to do anything about it. Are you connected via DSL. This is 10 times slower than regular LAN.

 

[Templar2k]

Hey Charipuki, you are absolutely right about comparing DSL with the speed of 10/100Mps of a regular LAN.
I guess I didn't consider this before and i learn the hard way.

Most files like MS word and excel are fast enough to view or download, now the real problem is when they are trying to access our Data base which was build on Microsoft Access 2002. And it takes for ever to view it or browse between records during the VPN session, so what I ended up doing is creating a data sheet web page form which can be accessed online
thru one of our static IP's. And problem solve, for now

Thanks everyone for your feedback, sorry i took a while to reply, but i get busy alot.

I.R.

 

[MJR40]

With Access large sections of the database are moved over the network and then processed on the local machine. You need some type of client/server database or application so that the processing happens on the machine containing the database and only the results are transmitted over the VPN. I am in the process of converting an Access order entry system to SQL Server for this very reason.

 

[Templar2k]

Thanks MJR40,

You know, that would be another way to do it, would you please let me know how did it go? because I have been thinking about converting my Data Base to SQL too, but not sure yet.

Thanks for your opinion.

Templar2k
Trade Secrets, that's the way!

 

[MJR40]

If I ever get my own VPN problems ironed out it looks like it will work quite well. At the remote office we will be supporting 2 customer service people using it all the time and 3 occasional users.

I have used everything I can think of to minimize the amount of VPN traffic. For example tables that don't change very often, like our model list, are kept in databases on each machine and synchronized with the main database periodically. Its not too hard but you really need to re-think when, where and how often the information gets used.


P.S. To see what I was saying about Access - look at the # of bytes sent and received on your VPN connection before and after you perform an action with Access. It depends on your data of course, but I saw things like 5 MB of data transmitted in order to return a 1 or 2 record result. As a comparison I just used Access connected to the SQL Server database to pull 29 fairly large records out of a table of 12,000 and the total bytes transfered both ways was 28K.

Good Luck !!!